EVENTS

Feedback on the new layout

Those of you who browse from the main page will probably have noticed that Freethoughblogs (including this page) has a new layout. What may be apparent to you, but not to me, is how that has changed functionality with commenting, or the readability, or any number of other factors that affect how you use the site.

If there’s anything missing, inaccessible, or otherwise seriously problematic about the new format, please let me know in the comments or by e-mail. You can also tell me stuff like “silver is stupid” or “the new logo is for dorks” or “I like the old site better”, but please rest assured that I am ignoring you, because I can’t change that stuff.

I really miss the links to previous/next posts that used to appear between the body and the comments. And I am not a fan of the way that, if you try to post a comment and aren’t logged in, you get a curt error screen *WITH NO LINK TO LOGIN*, and your comment is discarded.

A log in link around the comment box would be nice. I had to do a search to find it on this page. On the FTB Recent | FTB Active panel, I’d prefer it if FTB Recent were the default. It helps me keep up to date on the smaller blogs around FTB without having to check all of them constantly. I’m usually browsing on my phone, and extra clicks on slower mobile devices are expensive from a user experience perspective.

I second the issue with the previous/next links. I click these links after reading the post, not before. Having them at the top also, can be useful when skipping over a post, but you don’t really want us doing that, eh?

Also, can you please restore them to a larger font and a more noticeable color? Older eyes would appreciate it.

And oh yes, a convenient log-in link! Or better yet, have it prompt you to log-in when you hit submit instead of accusing you of being an imposter.

Far more people want to know what’s knew from the Bloggers than what’s new from the commenters. Yes, I and others take active part in discussions and would like to see what’s recently important, but there’s a larger group of people that aren’t commenting.

Plus, it’s annoying to me personally. Really active threads stay really active – I can check those 1/day to see if I missed an important conversations. But new blog posts easily disappear without notice by the time 24 hours roll by.

What is the possibility of adding a comment voting system? Has this been discussed before (either here or on another FTB blog)? Maybe a “Smart” button and/or a “Funny” button? Friendly Atheist has one and the top “Best” comments are always extremely insightful in my opinion.

Not a bad suggestion, but not one that I see getting implemented any time soon to be totally honest. Right now we are trying to grapple with getting the basic functionality back. Once we’ve dealt with the glitches, I’ll run this idea up the flagpole and see who salutes it.

I thought those links had gone away entirely. It was Joe’s post that had me triple-check and found them. I’d been overlooking them as part of the banner ad block.
So, yes, the next/previous post links need help.

There are accessibility issues with the reply link in comments. If you’re using a screen reader, which I am, the reply link appears before the comment. It’s then rather annoying to navigate backwards to find it once I’ve listened to the comment should I want to reply, especially for larger comments.

If you’re able to just abandon threaded/nested comments and move to chronological comments, there’ll be a lot of grateful people.

The main reason given for hating threaded comments is that it’s too hard to catch up on a comment thread as you’ve got to scan through the whole thread to find new comments, which is annoying for 20 comments and fucking torture for 200.

If you’ll allow me to ramblingly indulge in a bit of blog nostalgia, the reason why I had nested comments in the first place is because when this blog caught it’s wind, I was averaging maybe 5-6 comments per post. And since all of my commenting happens on the back end of the site, I’ve never had to wrangle with the threading.